


dream a little dream of me

by b00mgh



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Concussions, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, bc im a slut for that trope, but some, collapsed building fic, hurt!Craig Tucker, hurt!Tweek Tweak, kenny and butters just get emotional pain here, not much comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:48:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27650891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: 8 years after climate change bit humanity in the ass, Tweek, Kenny, Butters, and Craig are trying to eke out a living in the fortified shell of Tweak Bros Coffee.Everything goes wrong on a supply run in Denver.
Relationships: Craig Tucker/Tweek Tweak, Kenny McCormick/Leopold "Butters" Stotch
Kudos: 19
Collections: Fanfiction I Dreamed Up





	dream a little dream of me

Supply runs in the city are always risky. 

Rival groups, mostly. If you see someone you don’t know, it’s almost common courtesy to shake them down for anything they’ve got. Or some group of assholes wait at the city limits and attack from either side until you give up what nonperishables and textiles you scavenged.

Tidal wave once in a while, now that the sea level’s risen that much– and there’s always some dickwad with a boat riding the wave, looking to loot the corpses that were too stupid or slow to get away before the wave hit. Almost all of Eric Cartman’s gang went that way; Kenny told them about it when Craig found him floating on a garbage patch as the waters receded, something like a year ago. Of course, now that it’s been like this so long, the bottoms of the taller buildings have started eroding, so a skyscraper falls over once in a while. 

Earthquakes will split the ground open under your feet and throw you right into the crack. 

Sometimes a cloud of some chemical warfare compound, escaped from a military testing sight gone defunct, will float by and make the whole place toxic for a week or two. They heard one of those got a bunch of the adults– Mr. Garrison, PC Principal, the Broflovskis and the Marshes and the Tuckers– and isn’t it funny that they still call the people who were adults when the climate change bit humanity in the ass ‘adults?’ 

Everyone’s an adult now. Nobody’s seen a kid in years, not anywhere near South Park, Colorado. Apparently, Heidi has someone’s kid, and Jimmy, Token, and Clyde are co-parenting some toddler they found squatting in a Wal-Mart in North Park. Tweek (and Craig, Butters, and Kenny, with some coercion) offered to join up with them, help them with the kid, but Jimmy, Token, and Clyde all agree that they’re alright for now. Don’t wanna move around too much. It’s a fair sentiment. The two groups still meet up once a month, on the full moon, to hang out and catch up. 

For now, it’s just Tweek, Kenny, Craig, and Butters living in the fortified, repurposed shell of Tweak Bros Coffee– one of the only one-story buildings in South Park that survived the first tornados. They’re some of the only people left in South Park. There’s Ike and Tricia’s group in what used to be the City Wok across town, and Wendy and Bebe’s group are still holed up in the old mall too. 

But everyone goes on supply runs to Denver. There’s not much left to scavenge in South Park after eight years of this shit, and there’s no way to grow anything when the sea level could rise at the drop of a hat or the eruption of some other volcano somewhere in the world. 

But when you go, you check the radio channels for news, you suit up like the radio didn’t just tell you the waves won’t be coming in today, you leave your valuables shoved under the futon you stole (with Bebe’s permission) from the furniture store in the mall, and you don’t separate from your group. For any reason. 

Unless someone is dead. 

Then you leave them because nobody has time for burials or corpses or anything like that. Going back for a corpse is like going back for a hair tie– except you might actually have use for a hair tie. 

But preparations aren’t worth jack shit when the sky decides to dump two feet of hail on what used to be the state of Utah before it went underwater and the edge of that monster storm hits half of Denver. 

They’ve all got whatever the fuck is solid enough to stop a 2-inch golf ball of hail from bashing their brains in at terminal velocity held up over their heads. Craig’s holding a wholeass car door, Kenny’s got the lid of a trash can, Butters has a slab of industrial-strength plywood, and Tweek has scrounged up a piece of aluminum that might have once served as part of a shanty-house roof. They don’t turn around though. No point in it. They’d have to walk through the storm to get home– smarter to find cover and wait it out. 

They dash for the cover of the nearest building, griping about the larger hail as it slams against their protective shields and rolls away to try and trip them as they follow each other to safety. This might have been an office building before, with neat glass windows making up every exterior wall, getting cleaned once a week by a man who isn’t getting paid enough to be up that high. Now the earthquakes have shattered the glass, the winds have scattered the shards all over town, and the briny tidal waves have turned the metal supports and structural walls cancerously rusty. The whole structure groans under the weight of the weather and the pitch of the wind that is beginning to pick up. 

So far, Kenny and Butters are carrying backpacks full of cans, and Tweek has a whole shelf of vitamins, supplements, medicines, and even some miscellaneous first aid supplies in his duffel– all courtesy of the recently vacated Denver Whole Foods. There used to be a really chaotically violent brand of hippies living in there, but it looks like they went cannibal last week. Not because they were out of food. Just for fun, or something. Maybe. Tweek isn’t sure. But they’re all (not just some,  _ all _ ) opened up and half-eaten in the bulk foods section, with each other’s blood caked on their faces. Who knows, maybe demons possessed them. It’s not Tweek’s business  _ why  _ they ate each other, but that’s definitely what happened and Tweek is benefitting from it, so.

Craig is still not carrying anything because they’re trying to see if they can find some more materials to fortify their base in the old coffee shop, and that’s gonna be his load for this run. The waves have been reaching closer and closer to South Park lately, and they want to make themselves as water-tight as possible. If they can find one, they’re thinking of getting a boat. But boats are in high demand as the oceans change shape, so water-tight it is until then. Before the hail, they’d been on the way to a Lowe’s on their way out of the city. 

“Fucking hell,” Craig grumbles. He hates weather more than he hates people, and that’s saying something. He only really talks to Tweek about it, and only once, but when he did it was something along the lines of  _ people are predictable _ and  _ I can fight a person, can’t fight the fucking clouds _ . 

Butters nods some assent, but tries, as he always does, to look on the bright side. “Least it ain’t the tornadoes this time,” he chirps in a pitch too high for the natural timbre of his voice, “sure is a lot easier to hide from hail than a tornado.”

Tweek feels his whole left side seize, and one hand rubs at his face compulsively while he snaps, “Don’t–  _ ngh _ – don’t say that! Hail c-can be a precursor to a tor-tor-tornado!”

“Babe, it’s gonna be fine. There’s no tornado.” Craig leans into Tweek– solid and still and grounding. 

Kenny wrinkles his nose in a smile. “Aren’t you two just the  _ cutest _ ?” he sings, “Leo, com’ere. They’re gonna outdo us at this rate.”

“Oh, jeez, we can’t have that!”

“Shut up, fuckwads, it’s not a competition and you two are grossly overconfident in yourselves.”

“Do we not have good reason to be?” Kenny pouts– but he can’t maintain the charade for long and he breaks out into cackles that stretch the scars around his jaw. 

Butters squeezes himself into the crook of Kenny’s elbow and basks in the warmth for a minute. Butters has no heat retention whatsoever, which is why they let him and Kenny sleep on the futon with a blanket when it’s cold, while Tweek and Craig take the mattress on the floor. “Looks like the hail’s lettin’ up, fellas,” he says brightly, “do we still wanna try the Lowe’s, or–?”

A strong gust of wind nearly topples Tweek like a twig in the dirt. He stumbles forward and skids to a halt in the street, both wound up with anxiety of an apple-sized chunk of hail sending his brains out his nose and trying to laugh off the slip-up. 

“I’ll call that a ‘let’s go home,’” Kenny chuckles, and nobody argues. They all would have preferred to hit up the Lowe’s, but it’s four blocks North of them, and they’re a little on edge after the hail visited. 

Craig glues himself to Tweek’s side and holds his hand. He mumbles something under his breath that the wind carries away– Tweek just hears  _ fall over _ and  _ fucking idiot _ . It makes him smile because he knows that’s how Craig worries. 

And then another gale, smelling of dryer, warmer weather, drops a fridge-sized hunk of erosion-ridden concrete with rust-warped rebar crawling out of some of the edges. It lands maybe three feet from Tweek’s right shoulder. Craig looks up. 

“Jesus fuckin–  _ Tweek,  _ **_run_ ** _! _ ” and he shoves Tweek in front of him and they sprint behind Butters and Kenny, because the combined weight of the hail pooling on the weaker side of the building and the wind wearing at it’s wave-eroded pillars has sent the building they were just in falling. They don’t scream. That would waste oxygen that could go to their legs and lungs to help them run  _ faster _ to get out of the way of the building.

It all takes maybe four seconds. After that, Tweek can no longer reliably tell what happened because something– hail or falling construction materials– bonked his head hard enough to send him to black. 

He peels his eyes open blearily while the world tumbles around and past him. Someone is carrying him. “Craig?” he tries, and he hears a long string of swearing before he’s out again. 

Kenny watches Tweek’s eyes roll around in their sockets and try to get a grip in the slippery land of post-concussive consciousness. They’re still running. Butters has told him twice to look out for a streetlight or stop sign. They probably don’t need to be running, but they’re scared, fucking terrified, and they want it as far behind them as possible. They left the building behind. They left. That building fell right on top of Craig– less than two yards behind Tweek– and they left.

Can’t go back for corpses. Nothing comes of it.

Kenny already knows the guilt will eat him alive. He’s done this once– when that wave came out of nowhere and Stan, Kyle, and Eric were gone just like that– but this is different. He didn’t have to physically  _ leave _ Stan, Kyle, or Eric. Just woke up floating on some garbage, still somehow alive, and the only thing to do was move on. This is different. 

_ He watched Craig get crushed by a fucking skyscraper and he left him there _ . 

Because he died. And there was nothing any of them could do about that. And you can’t go back for corpses. 

But  _ fucking hell _ .

When the adrenaline runs thin and their breath runs thinner, they stop running and Kenny falls to the ground and sobs. He drops Tweek, who doesn’t respond except to groan uncomfortably. 

“Ken, we gotta get home–”

“I left him there, Leo, I left him to die–”

Butters doesn’t reply right away. He kneels next to him and wraps his arms around Kenny’s shoulders. He remembers Craig dragging Kenny home that night last year, when Butters had been running with him and Tweek for a few years. Craig had been the one to find Kenny after the wave that killed the rest of Eric Cartman’s gang, and when he had come back to the shop soaking wet dragging, of all people, Kenny McCormick, it was nothing short of batshit crazy. Craig hated people. Hadn’t stuck his neck out for anyone except Tweek and, once or twice, Butters. To bring home a half-drowned asshole from someone else’s gang? It was a fucking absurd move for Craig– who is now dead. Crushed under a skyscraper. It’s more than survivor’s guilt that’s got Kenny sobbing on his knees halfway home from Denver. 

“Nobody survives that, Ken,” Butters murmurs, “he probably didn’t even feel it. Ya know, cause it got him in the head first, comin’ from above an’ all that.” Butters feels the pain welling in his throat and leaking from his eyes, but Craig is gone and Tweek’s bleeding like a stuck pig from a nasty cut on the side of his head and if they don’t want to lose him too they have to keep moving. 

“Fuck, Leo, why do I have to keep living!?” Kenny cries, almost screaming, “Why does everyone else die and I don’t!?”

There’s no rational answer for that because nobody picks when they die. Well, except the Marshes and the Tweaks– they picked when they wanted to die alright. But suicide just leaves the survivors haunted and hollow. He can’t do much for the hurt though. Butters sinks further into Kenny and they’re both crying but Butters is saying, “Ken, we gotta get back. Tweek’s head don’t l-look great.” 

Kenny nods. He knows. He scoops Tweek back up and pulls himself to his feet. Tweek mumbles something about Craig. Butters and Kenny don’t know what the fuck they’re gonna tell him when he wakes up. 

They have several hours between getting home and Tweek being lucid enough to hold a conversation, but they still don’t know how to break it to him what happened.

Once, several months ago, when Kenny had just joined them, Craig left to check on Clyde and Token and Jimmy (who had missed the last full moon meetup because they found a toddler squatting in a WalMart), and it should have taken a little under a day. By the next afternoon, he hadn’t come back and Butters and Kenny had watched helplessly as Tweek literally threw himself outside to track Craig down with a face like he’d kill a man. And he did. Because he found Craig with a bullet hole in his forearm underneath some asshole trying to steal his shoes and Craig said Tweek killed him and didn’t elaborate on how. Butters knows of other times where Tweek has, as he and Kenny put it, ‘snapped’ when Craig is compromised, but he doesn’t like to talk about it for the same reason that Craig didn’t elaborate on how Tweek killed the man trying to steal his shoes. When Tweek snaps, it’s fucking scary. 

So, no, they don’t know how they’re going to tell him Craig is dead. 

When Tweek can keep his eyes all the way open for thirty seconds and speak in full sentences, they consider themselves largely out of the woods, in a medical sense. They’re working with a fourth-graders medicinal skill, which is basically nothing. Who’s got time to teach kids what to do with a concussion when the whole planet is actively falling apart? Certainly not the McCormicks or the Stotches. And the apocalypse isn’t great at teaching through experience either. So it’s a fourth-grade medicinal skill seasoned in eight years of apocalypse experience. They still think the best thing for a concussion is to sleep it off. As long as he wakes up able to speak, and can remember his own name, it’s probably fine. 

Tweek won’t go to bed yet though. Something like every fifteen minutes he’ll squat himself down by the gap that lets them see outside the sheet metal fortifications and stare out there, expression foggy, until Kenny or Butters asks him what he’s doing.

“I’m waiting for Craig,” he tells them, all five times, no matter what they said last time. Then either Kenny or Butters will lead him back to bed, and he’ll stay there until he decides that he’s still waiting for Craig.

He seems to fall asleep, so Butters asks Kenny if he wants him to stay up, and Kenny says he’d prefer to be alone for a bit, and Butters says ok, and he goes to bed and Kenny wanders around the coffee shop trying not to think about how Craig’s never gonna come back and bitch about the way anything they cook tastes a little like caffeine because the smell permeates the air so thickly. He scrubs tears from his face with the hem of his sleeve so much that his eyes water from irritation as well as grief. Then he thinks about Tweek, who’s going to lose his fucking mind when he realizes Craig isn’t coming back, and he cries more. Kenny is so tired of losing people he loves. 

He hears something rustle towards the storeroom, where he knows Butters and Tweek are sleeping, and after a few minutes Tweek ambles out. His face is too dazed to hold an expression beyond mild confusion. He sits next to the gap in the metal sheets that protect them from the outside world. 

“Kenny,” he asks, “when’s Craig c-coming back?” 

Kenny jumps. Tweek is staring right at him. He doesn’t look panicked or scared. He isn’t jittery. He’s confused, but not upset. Tweek looks almost serene. Just waiting for Craig to come back. Kenny has never had trouble telling it like it is before, but he can’t cough up the words now to break that peace. Tweek doesn’t know yet. And Kenny can’t bring himself to force the knowledge on him when he still thinks all is right in their fucked up little world. Let him have this peace tonight. 

Kenny smiles, soft and reassuring. “Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow,” he says, swallowing tears. Tweek nods, and goes back to staring out the gap between the metal sheets. Kenny scoops him up like a child and says, “Let’s get you back in bed.” Tweek nods. Kenny carries him back to the storeroom and tucks a blanket around him on the mattress on the floor. He hopes the blanket will restrict his movements enough to keep Tweek in bed if he wakes up again. 

Then Kenny climbs into the futon with Butters and cries himself to sleep. 

Craig wakes up because there’s blood in his teeth and that liquid is the only moisture his mouth has, but the taste makes his tongue wants to evict itself from his body. Concrete dust and blood. Not a great combo. He does not, for a minute, remember where he is, and he doesn’t bother thinking about it because Craig Tucker has always been a better doer than thinker. He just claws his way out of the rubble. It takes him the better part of an hour because his whole body protests and makes him rest after each movement. Only once he is out, and can see a whole world around him, with infinite directions to walk in, does he consider that he has no clue where he is, who he is, why he is here, or where he should go. He sits and thinks for several minutes, and his stream of consciousness feels like peanut butter out of a soap dispenser. 

After extreme mental anguish, he remembers his friends– blonde motherfuckers, every one of them, and he remembers that he needs to find them. Their names duck and weave through his memory, and when he finally catches Tweek’s name between his fingers, he quickly searches himself for a way to write it down. He’s got a sharpie in his breast pocket with a cracked cap, and he scrapes Tweek’s name onto his forearm. Then he remembers Kenny’s name, and he writes it under Tweek’s. Butters’ name comes right in with Kenny’s, and he writes that down too. He can’t remember his  _ own _ name, but he figures one of those blonde motherfuckers probably remembers it, and he can ask them when he gets there. 

He does not think about where ‘there’ is. He just walks, and lets muscle memory take control of the direction.

After several hours of walking in what is probably the right direction, the moon begins to sink behind the horizon, and Craig begins to think that, maybe, walking isn’t always this painful. He has no evidence that this is true, but it just doesn’t seem quite right that walking hurts this bad. And he doesn’t think he’s always had a limp either. But Craig is a doer, not a thinker, so he dismisses these thoughts as something that somebody else can deal with, when he finds somebody else. 

He does not encounter anyone else until the hour when the light from the sunrise seeps into the sky despite the fact that the sun is having a hard time getting out of bed. The person he encounters seems to know him. 

“Craig?” they say, “Craig Tucker?” 

He wouldn’t have known they were talking to him except nobody else is around. He walks towards the person. They lower a large knife that had been poised to defend themselves, sticking it into a sheath attached to a belt loop on their jeans. “You’re Trish’s big brother, right?” 

Craig honestly isn’t sure. He nods so that he doesn’t have to reveal his uncertainty. 

“Dude, no offense, but are you okay?” the person asks, “You look like shit.”

Craig opens his mouth to talk and finds that he can’t. His mouth moves the right way but the only sound that he can force out is the raspy edge of an unintelligible whisper. Fuck. 

The person narrows their eyes at him, saying, “Maybe I should bring you back to our place…” and then it occurs to them to ask, “What’re you doing outside the coffee shop alone anyway? Is everything alright with Tweek?”

Tweek. Craig recognizes that name. He gestures to it on his arm so that this person can see the writing. 

They nod vacantly, their expression morphing into anxiety. They pull out a radio. “Hey, Tricia, you there?”

The radio replies in a garbled, familiar voice, “Ike? What’s up?”

“Yeah, hey, I’m out patrolling and I’ve got your brother here looking like he got put in a fucking meat grinder. He can’t talk an–”

“Craig? Is he okay? Put him on.”

“Yeah, like I said, he can’t talk, and he’s just kind of wandering? I’m a little worried. He looks like shit. I’m not kidding when I say it looks like somebody dipped him in red paint.”

“Kentucky fried christ– got a position on Tweek?”

“Nothing. Trish, I’m pretty sure Nathan saw Tweek and Kenny and Butters get home last night– I think Craig got separated.”

Craig recognizes the names being said, but can’t put a lot of significance to the other words in the conversation– he’s so tired. He just wants to find the people he is supposed to be with and let them handle all of this thinking bullshit. 

The radio replies, “Can he hear me? Craig, are you there?”

Craig is, at this point, fairly sure he is being addressed, and nods firmly. The person in front of him translates this for the radio.

The radio says, “Craig, did Tweek or Kenny or Butters do this to you?”

Craig does not remember, but there is a certainty in his bones that they did not do this to him. He shakes his head. The person in front of him translates this for the radio.

The radio says, “Do you know where you’re going, Craig?” 

Craig does not know where he is going, but he also doesn’t want to reveal any weakness to the person in front of him or the radio. He nods. The person in front of him translates this for the radio.

“Alright, I guess,” the radio says, “Let him go, Ike. God knows we’re already almost out of med supplies as it is. Besides, I’m sure Tweek’s already losing his goddamned mind and I am  _ not _ looking to be another Tyler Biggle.”

The name Tyler Biggle brings to mind ratty tennis shoes and pain in the arm and a corpse with half of its face smashed in with a brick.

The person in front of Craig makes a face and says, “Yeah, alright. See ya around Craig. Tell everyone I said hi,” and then walks off. As they go, Craig hears them tell the radio, “It’s  _ Craig _ , Trish, he’s gonna be fine.”

Craig keeps walking in whichever direction feels about right, but the sun is well above the horizon now, and that makes him a little irrationally anxious.

Butters wakes up because Tweek is screaming. Like an animal. The first thing Butters thinks about this is “thank god he can still think rationally,” because Butters knows why Tweek is screaming before he’s had time to process any of his own thoughts. If Tweek is screaming because he has realized Craig is dead, then that means that he can remember Craig being dead, which means he hasn’t suffered permanent brain damage, which is the only good news Butters expects they will have in the foreseeable future. And he sure does like to see the bright side as much as possible, even if he and Kenny both cried themselves to sleep last night, and will probably be crying themselves to sleep every night for a while. 

Still, Butters jumps to his feet and skids into the main area of the shop, where Tweek is still howling like a banshee. Kenny is physically holding Tweek back from leaving– and Butters knows this means that Tweek is trying to leave to do something awfully dumb, because otherwise Kenny wouldn’t bother holding him back. Kenny gives Butters a look that says  _ are you going to help me or just stand there _ , and Butters gets right in front of Tweek and plants himself there and wraps both arms around Tweek’s shoulders until Tweek gets that he’s not going nowhere. 

The wordless shrieks dissolve to semi-articulate screams, “ _ He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead– GAH– we left Craig to die he’s– NGH– Craig’s not coming back he’s not coming back– _ ”

Butters and Kenny both ground Tweek to the peeling linoleum of the coffee shop because they all know the rule: you can’t go back for corpses. And if Tweek isn’t leaving the coffee shop to find a corpse, he’s leaving the coffee shop to make one– some way or another. 

It takes him something like an hour to run out of energy, and he skips quiet consciousness and he sinks straight to his knees and goes nearly catatonic. He’s still saying the same things– “ _ he’s dead Craig is dead I let him die” _ – but now he’s whispering them because he’s shredded his throat screaming for an hour straight. 

The stalemate they held for that long is honestly a testament to everyone’s constitution. 

“Tweek,” Butters tries, now that it’s quiet enough for his voice to be heard, “nobody could have survived that. You can’t help nothin’ by goin’ out there– all you’d do is make yerself a target for anyone lookin’ to scramble yer eggs.”

Tweek’s tears begin to fall faster, and Butters realizes that the helplessness isn’t comforting. 

Kenny adds, “But it was quick. He probably didn’t–” his voice cracks, and he has to clear his throat to get a handle on it again, “probably didn’t feel a thing. That’s all anyone can hope for, I guess.”

Tweek hiccups and stammers over the first coherent thought he’s tried to voice all morning: “I n-n-nee– have to go find the body–  _ please _ – he-he could be– Craig could be–” Tweek can’t finish, it breaks off in sobs. 

Butters and Kenny meet each other’s eyes over Tweek’s huddled body. They realize for the first time that their sacred rule–  _ you can’t go back for a corpse _ – isn’t quite right. There is a point to a corpse. Closure. Because the alternative to closure is Tweek ripping his hair out of his head in blond handfuls and reopening that gash on the side of his head because  _ how can they be sure if Craig is really dead what if he’s alive out there and he’s scared and alone and hurt and they left him _ –

And then someone bangs on the window. Which is absolutely fucking absurd, because nobody in South Park would reasonably bang on the windows of the coffee shop. Tricia and Ike’s gang know how to get in, Wendy and Bebe’s gang really don’t visit, and any gang passing through town wouldn’t look twice at a boarded up coffee shop when there’s an unfortified Rite Aid just down the block. Butters, Kenny, and Tweek fall silent. Butters still puts a finger to his lips to indicate that they should  _ stay _ silent (mostly directed at Tweek) while he creeps to the gap in the metal sheets that he can see the front sidewalk through. 

Nobody is there.

Except someone bangs on what used to be the front door of the coffee shop again, startling Butters so bad he falls on his ass. He can barely see the front door from the gap in the metal sheets, but he cranes his neck to try and immediately squeaks out a wheezy, horrified breath. 

“C-C-Craig!?” Butters stammers. 

Which sends Tweek right into panic mode– slamming himself to his feet and sprinting to the entrance in the corner where they can fold the metal sheets outward. Butters and Kenny rush out after and  _ holy fucking shit it’s actually Craig _ . He looks like something out of a horror movie, but he’s  _ alive _ and he’s  _ smiling _ and he’s mostly being held upright by Tweek. He keeps pointing at his arm, on which their names are all written, in shaky, sloppy handwriting:  _ Tweek, Kenny, Butters. _

Tweek is, of course, babbling, throat scratching over the damage he did to it less than thirty minutes ago, even while he drags Craig inside and into the storeroom to sit on the mattress. They almost start to clean him up with baby wipes, but it’s getting them nowhere so instead they maneuver him to the bathroom and just scrub him down by dumping coffee cups full of water on him and scrubbing the blood and dust off with old rags. Craig doesn’t protest, even though he looks incredibly uncomfortable. The whole time, Kenny and Butters and Tweek are a litany of  _ I’m so sorry _ and  _ are you okay, like actually _ and  _ I’m so fucking happy you’re alive _ and  _ I can’t believe it _ . 

Once he is no longer the walking definition of gore, they sit him back down on the mattress in the storeroom and wrap him in a blanket and hand him water and granola bars. He doesn’t touch the granola, but chugs the water fast enough to gag a little. 

After four cups of water, he speaks for the first time since yesterday, when a building fell on him. 

“I remember you guys,” Craig whispers hoarsely. Which is a funny thing to say, they all think. “I almost forgot.”

On purpose, they don’t ask about it. They don’t look the gift horse in the mouth. 

Then they start patching Craig up.

Around noon the next day, Ike and Tricia come by, full combat gear (or, the closest some eighteen-year-olds can make out of shit they’ve found lying around the apocalypse), and they come right in the folding flap in the metal sheets in the corner of the coffee shop. They’re worried about Craig because they, apparently, saw him wandering around looking like a fucking zombie yesterday– Craig says he doesn’t remember seeing  _ either _ of them yesterday, and Ike says  _ yea I bet you don’t, you probably had a concussion _ . 

Those two stick around for a while and then, when they’re sure the boys aren’t dead or dying, they go back to their base in the old City Wok across town. 

At the full-moon meetup with Token and Jimmy and Clyde and the toddler, Marie, that they found squatting in the WalMart, Craig and Butters tell the story of what happened after Craig asks if he has met Marie before (he hasn’t) and if he’s supposed to know who she is (he is). Token says they’ve been cutting it way too close lately with those supply runs, and Jimmy says Denver isn’t safe anymore. 

Kenny laughs and says, “Yeah, but what’re we gonna do? Start farming?” but Token and Clyde and Jimmy don’t laugh. They say they have been farming. Supply runs are becoming not only increasingly dangerous, but also increasingly obsolete as the cities get emptier. Nobody’s trucking the canned corn in from Iowa anymore. Token says it’s smarter to start farming now, before everything has completely run out, so that you can stock up on enough of whatever nonperishables are left to scavenge for a hard winter. 

Clyde looks at them all and says, kinda laughing but totally serious, “We’ve set up a compound in what used to be an old folks home, there’s plenty of room for more– and we’ve already cleared out the corpses.”

Marie, the toddler from the WalMart who informs them very loudly that she is  _ already _ five years old, asks if they’re gonna come over.

Kenny says, kinda laughing but totally serious, “Who could say no to that face?”

They take a week to think about it, and then they pack up whatever they want to take with them and they board the coffee shop up real tight so no weather and no other people can get in there, and they tell Ike and Tricia’s gang where they’re going, and they head up to the  _ Peaceful Respite Convalescent Home of North Park _ . 

**Author's Note:**

> :D so. another fanfic based on an extremely vivid dream? u bet uer ass bb <3
> 
> want more south park content from me? Great, bc I have 60k words and counting of a south park high school au that imma start posting next Friday! Hope to see u there!  
> Want more updates? Follow me on tumblr [bmgh-writing] or tiktok [bmgh.writing] for daily fanfic quotes and memes! :D
> 
> ilyasm!!! as always,  
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!!! <3333


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